Companies are generating and storing ever-increasing amounts of information. Companies are requiring higher levels of availability and performance to support trends such as e-business and globalization. As networked storage infrastructures become more complex, and storage devices grow in number and size, companies are faced with the challenge of effectively managing their storage. Companies need to improve storage asset utilization by identifying and reclaiming underutilized storage.
There are many things organizations need to know about their infrastructure. Among these are how well are their assets being utilized, could they be used more efficiently, how much valuable storage is consumed by non-business or stale data and the like. Today, most organizations gather this critical information through a series of manual, labor-intensive reporting processes that do not scale. The most sophisticated organizations today are using manually updated spreadsheets to generate reports. These processes are error-prone and the information they produce may already out of date by the time it is reported. This limits a company's ability to ensure efficient storage asset utilization in its current storage infrastructure and to do effective capacity planning for the future. Improving storage utilization is essential to maximizing return on investment (ROI) and achieving an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy. By understanding how storage is allocated and used, administrators can align resources to information's changing value over time, identify underutilized storage for reclamation, and improve provisioning processes.
Of all the system resources, storage tends to be one of the most difficult to plan capacity for in a predictive fashion. It is only by collecting detailed information about how storage is allocated, and how it is being used that capacity forecasting can be effectively accomplished. Storage administrators today are under increased pressure to keep capital expenditures under control. They must figure out how to both improve the utilization of their existing storage assets and more accurately plan future storage purchases. These objectives, however, cannot be met without a thorough and accurate understanding of the current utilization of their storage infrastructure.
Improving storage utilization from the host perspective is only one part of the equation; unfortunately, many reporting tools on the market today can only provide the host view. Of equal importance is to improve the storage utilization across a storage infrastructure.
Administrators run software (e.g. SRM available from EMC Corporation of Hopkinton, Mass.) that can identify hosts that may be candidates for storage reclamation. These hosts could have large amounts of old, infrequently accessed, duplicate, or non-business files that are consuming valuable storage capacity. Once these hosts are identified, storage administrators can deploy software to locate these files and/or reclaim that capacity by executing action policies.